Games of chance provide entertainment to many. A game of chance is a game whose outcome is strongly influenced by some randomizing device, and upon which contestants frequently wager money. Common devices used include dice, spinning tops, playing cards, roulette wheels or numbered balls drawn from a container. Gambling is known in nearly all human societies. Early people used the knucklebones of sheep as dice. Some games of chance may also involve a certain degree of skill. This is especially true where the player or players have decisions to make based upon previous or incomplete knowledge, such as poker and blackjack.
Bingo is a game of chance in which randomly selected numbers are drawn and players match those numbers to those appearing on 5×5 matrices which are printed or electronically represented and are known as “cards.” The first person to have a card where the drawn numbers form a specified pattern (usually in a straight line) is the winner and calls out the word “bingo” to alert others and inform the caller of the win.
Bingo has been traced back to a lottery game called “Lo Giuoco Code Loto” played in Italy in the 1500's. By the eighteenth century, the game had matured, and in France, playing cards, tokens, and the calling out of numbers had been added to the game. In the nineteenth century, Bingo was widely used in Germany for educational purposes, to teach children spelling, animal names, and multiplication tables.
At a travelling carnival near Atlanta in 1929, Beano was being played with dried beans, a rubber stamp, and cardboard sheets. Edwin Lowe was watching this game and noticed how engaged the players were. Lowe took the idea with him to New York, where he introduced the game to his friends. He conducted bingo games similar to the ones he had witnessed, using dried beans, a rubber numbering stamp and card board. His friends loved the game. Folklore has it that one of his players made bingo history when he was so excited to have won that he yelled out “Bingo” instead of “Beano”, and the name stuck. The Lowe Bingo Game had two versions: the first a 12-card set for $1.00; the second a $2.00 set with 24 cards. Bingo was a wildly successful. By the 1940's, Bingo games were common all over the country.
In the U.S., the game is primarily staged by churches or charity organizations. Their legality and stakes vary by state regulation. In some states, bingo halls are rented out to sponsoring organizations, and such halls often run games almost every day. Church-run games, however, are normally weekly affairs held on the church premises. These games are usually played for modest stakes, although the final game of a session is frequently a coverall game that offers a larger jackpot prize for winning within a certain quantity of numbers called; a progressive jackpot may increase per session until it is won.
Commercial bingo games in the U.S. are primarily offered by casinos (for example in the state of Nevada), and by Native American bingo halls, which are often housed in the same location as Native American casinos. In Nevada, bingo is usually offered only by casinos that cater to local gamblers, and not tourist resorts. Nevada bingo halls usually offer several two-hour sessions daily, with relatively modest stakes except for coverall jackpots. Native American games are typically offered for only one or two sessions a day, and are often played for higher stakes than charity games in order to draw players from distant places. Some also offer a special progressive jackpot game that may tie together players from multiple bingo halls.
While such bingo games continue to offer entertainment to many, player who have now for decades been playing the game often tire of it. Thus, what would be advantageous would be a new game that takes advantage of the familiarity of bingo to players, but yet provides a new, exciting gaming experience.